Is There A Hazard Lurking Overhead?

Trees form our landscape’s canopy. Their lush, green foliage relaxes us and keeps us cool in the summer. As winter approaches, deciduous trees lose their leaves and gird themselves for whatever Old Man Winter brings.

Your trees may look perfectly healthy to your untrained eye. However, dangerous conditions could be lurking just below the bark, in the center of the trunk, the roots or anywhere else in or on the tree.

Before the snow, ice and winds of winter put their annual stress on your trees, it would be a good idea to have a professional inspection by one of our arborists. As living organisms, trees are subject to internal diseases and breakage while the outside looks as normal as ever.

A tree health inspection should be an annual practice, especially if you have tree limbs hanging over your house, car, pool or other parts of your yard. A high wind gust could break weak limbs and drop them right where they can injure people or damage property.

Besides checking for weak limbs and branches, the arborist will check for rot in the center of the tree or in the roots. He will also check for radial cracking. A previous wind storm could have caused one or more weak limbs to twist, resulting in internal cracking that makes a cross section of the branch look like it had been cut like a pie. These limbs are very weak and susceptible to breakage in subsequent storms.

The arborist will check for insect and disease activity. He’ll pay special attention to boring insects that do their damage beneath the bark. This is damage that is difficult to see unless looking closely, and most of the signs occur high in the trees.

The inspection findings will be detailed in a report that includes a prioritized list of recommendations that will be presented to you. Recommendations can range from just monitoring the tree health to pruning, pest treatment or bracing and cabling. In some extreme cases, we may have to remove the tree,

Very strong winds can buffet our area. Last winter, we witnessed the added weight that unrelenting snow can put on tree limbs, and many of us still remember the mighty ice storms that crippled our area several times during the last quarter century. Our more mature trees also witnessed these events. Some survived while others weren’t so lucky. A tree inspection will give you the peace of mind of knowing the odds that your trees can continue to survive.